Big memory sale at Apple.com!

Woo hoo! For a limited time you can save up to $700 on select memory upgrades from Apple.

On second thought, Dells sales generally bump you up to 512megs for free at the moment, and Apples RAM, so I decided to check what the difference might be, since well, you know, Apples RAM is on sale, and Dell isn't thought to have bargain basement RAM prices in the x86 world:

To go to 512megs of RAM:
Dell: FREE
Apple: $200

To go to 1gig of RAM:
Dell: FREE
Apple: $350

To go to 2gig of RAM:
Dell: $470
Apple: $650

To go to 4gig of RAM:
Dell: $2,350
Apple: $2450

I used Apple's single processor memory prices, with the savings applied, and using a best case scenario (IE, using four 512 modules instead of two for 1gig of RAM). But still, not so good. Dell is giving it away for free until 2gigs, at which point Apple is still 28% more expensive, even though its on sale. When not on sale, Apple's memory would be 50% more than Dells.

At 4gigs Apple is only 5% more expensive. And realize that going through someone like datamem, 4gigs would cost less than $1000.

I'm starting to think someone at Apple rings a bell every time a user buys RAM, its just a joke. I could have done some more, but it was getting a little silly. IE, Dells dually CPU lines all use ECC ram, and Apple only started using that in the XserveG5 a month ago or so, and Apple basically won't let you buy less than 1gig, whereas Dell starts you off at 256 and throws in stuff for free.

I one could start calculating based on what the upgrades cost, but that was more work than this laugh was worth.